The Battle of the Browsers will revive again as the new contender joins in. If you think that we have enough Internet browsers as it is, think again. Google is not going to let Mozilla and Microsoft take all the glory for themselves.

Google Chrome is ready to be released from Google’s arsenal of fast apps on September 2, 2008. This new browser from Google is designed to be fast, simple and clean, just like the Google Homepage. The philosophy behind the development of this new browser is to make things clean and simple, take away all the unnecessary stuff and let the user do the important stuff like browsing, chatting and sending emails. Google Chrome gets out of the way so you can surf the Internet or write those emails. Most of the components in Chrome is from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Webkit, but will remain open-source, and participation from community to help build this new browser is encouraged.

From Chrome’s official blog:

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Google also takes the road less traveled in introducing their new app – this time they have used comics in introducing their new open-source browser. Not very typical way of introducing a new app but indeed very unique. The comics about Google Chrome can be found here.

For now, Google Chrome is available only for Windows but time will only tell when there is going to be a version for Linux, which I am willing to wait patiently. As for the number of choices that we have for browsers, all I can say is we can’t have too many browsers. Tell that to web developers as they have another browser to test their sites on.

Author’s Note:

I will update this post once the browser is released. I will also include the link to the download site as well.

Software developer Unison has launched what it claims is the world’s first fully-unified communications suite based on Linux.

Announced at CeBIT, the suite (also simply called Unison) combines IP telephony, e-mail and instant messaging with diary, address book and presence capabilities, all in a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

“You can get all these elements separately on Linux, but this is the first time they have all been in one server,” said Rurik Bradbury, Unison’s chief marketing officer. Other unified communications (UC) schemes, such as Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) can require three or more servers to do the same thing, he added.

“If you’re reasonably familiar with Linux, you can deploy Unison in a couple of hours, and have a complete system running for a company of perhaps 50 or 60 people in half a day,” he said.

The server software works with a Unison client program for Windows PCs. This provides a genuine alternative to Microsoft’s combination of Exchange and Outlook, Bradbury claimed.

“We’re amazed no-one has done this before — build both a client and a server. Others have either one or the other,” he said. He added that a Linux version of the client will come later this year.

Unison is aimed at 20- to 300-seat organizations, but the US-based company plans to add server clustering in the future to support more. It is partly based on open source technology, such as Thunderbird for email and Jabber for instant messaging, and partly developed by Unison’s own programmers.

The software is initially offered as a free beta version but is already fit for use, Bradbury claimed.

“It is almost finished — it is relatively stable software,” he said, joking that he uses commercial software that’s less robust.

Once the beta program is complete there will be a free “community” version for up to 20 users, and per-user or perpetual licences will be sold for larger systems, although pricing for those is not yet fixed.